NOW ABOUT THE COLLECTION
There’s nothing here but a simple transitional
particle. “Now” There’s no drum roll, no trumpet blast, no drama-filled pause.
“Now about…” You might imagine the tone being something like a let down: “Okay,
that’s that dealt with; let’s move on to the next thing on the agenda. Hmmm,
yes, well all right, the collection.” But imagining it like that would be a
real blunder.
The text is 1 Corinthians 16:1, of course, and Paul
has just concluded his lengthy discussion on the resurrection of the dead with
a shout of triumph: “Death where is your victory? Death where is your
sting?” In the name of the risen and immortal Lord Jesus he jeers at
arrogant Death and yells, “Loser!”
What a triumph; there’s a throbbing and an assured
hope in the shout, nothing timid about it. The graveyards in all the hamlets,
all the villages, all the towns, all the cities and all the vast metropolises
on the planet must have heard it and trembled! All the tombs and secret places
no one knows about, where countless dead were thrown, having been used and
butchered—all those unknown prisons where proud Death keeps them shut away—they
must have heard the sound and shivered.
And what then does Paul do? Should he not have
closed the letter with that exultant cry? He didn’t—without hesitation he moves
from the glory of a cosmic event to:
“Now, about the collection for God’s people.”
Paul speaks of that collection in this text, in
Romans 15:25-31, Galatians 2:10 and in 2 Corinthians he takes two entire
chapters out of thirteen to speak about it.
It’s not uncommon in congregations to take sixty
seconds to say the collection will now be taken and then perhaps four minutes
to collect it and that’s all and that’s the last it’s heard of until the next
Lord’s Day.
This isn’t the place to develop the contexts of the
passages mentioned but each one is rich in truth about God and his reconciling
of the two divisions of the human family [Jews and non-Jews]. Note the
occasion of his mentioning the collection in Galatians [a profoundly
critical moment where—humanly speaking—the life of the Church of the Lord Jesus
is at stake]. Note the brotherly and sisterly interdependence he speaks of in
Romans 15 and note that he makes the entire gift of the Gentiles to the needy
Jewish Christians [and others] a Christological matter in 2
Corinthians
8:9. In the completely free gift of the Gentiles [8:8 and see 9:7] they
are imitating the reconciling work of the Christ. We need to reflect
carefully and prayerfully on the setting and the words of these texts.
The grace of giving is the grace of God given to us
[8:1] and it re-enacts the grace of God flowing through the Jewish Messiah to
the entire world. This giving is a visible witness that God came in Jesus
Christ and reconciled the world unto himself and it is carried out by the men
and women who are part of that one body of Christ in which all nations are
welcomed.
As the dollars and checks are dropped on to the
plate or into the basket wondrous things are being said. Assuming the heart is
good this giving event is not to be rushed or treated as a secondary
issue—God’s inestimable gift to the entire human family—Jesus Christ—is being
proclaimed.
This is the perfect act to follow eating the bread and drinking
the wine, the perfect act to express the meaning of the Lord's Supper as
Paul speaks of it in 1 Corinthians 11 where the "haves" were refusing
to share with the "have nots".